My grad-school buddy Susanne emailed me this L. A. Times article about Gov. Schwarzenegger’s proposal to divert 75% of punitive damage awards to the state. I first encountered this idea as a debate case on the APDA circuit, but I didn’t know any actual policymakers had proposed such a thing. But it turns out that several states (Alaska, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon, and Utah) already collect some percentage of punitive damage awards.
In favor of the proposal, there's the fact that punitive damages will deter tortious behavior regardless of who receives the award, and giving the damages to the plaintiff (on top of compensatory damages that he will receive regardless) just encourages more lawsuits.
Against the proposal, we should recognize that plaintiffs do need a sufficient incentive to file suit. Especially when a large chunk of all damages, including compensatory damages, goes to the plaintiffs’ attorneys instead of the actual victims, punitive damages might be needed to fill in the gap to make the bottom-line payment to the victim large enough. (Punitive damages serve some other purposes besides giving plaintiffs incentive to bring suit, but all of those other purposes would be served just as well if the damages went to the state.)
But what is a “large enough” payment for the victim to receive? It depends on the goal. Damage awards serve two purposes – compensation of victims and deterrence of future tortfeasors – and the correct amount for the former might not be the optimal amount for the latter. The right dollar amount for deterrence purposes could be greater or less than the right amount of compensation. Think about it this way: if someone did $1 million of damage to you, but you could only get $800,000 of it back, would that stop you from filing suit? I think not. Thus, there’s no particular reason to think that a damage award (net of attorney’s fees) equal to the monetary damage suffered by the victim necessarily induces the right amount of lawsuits.
On balance, the proposal sounds good to me, because I'm not terribly concerned about having too few lawsuits. I think it's pretty clear that we currently have too many. Given that punitive damages are often determined as a multiple – sometimes a very large multiple – of compensatory damages, I suspect allowing plaintiffs to keep 25% of punitive damages is sufficient to make sure they actually receive full compensation even after paying off their attorneys. Still, if I were voting on the proposal, I’d want to see some figures on typical punitive damage awards to be sure.
I’m squeamish about giving the government a new source of revenues, though. If we could trust that the new revenue stream would be offset by decreases in other sources, like income taxes, that would be one thing. But that never happens. The state will spend whatever money you give it and ask for more. Indeed, the Governor’s proposal is part of his plan to balance California’s budget. Worse, the state might have an incentive to encourage larger punitive damage awards or more tortious behavior. Those baleful possibilities would have to be weighed against the reduced incentive for plaintiffs to file lawsuits.
Here’s an alternative proposal: collect the punitive damages from the defendants, give the plaintiffs a 25% cut, and burn the rest. Destroying dollar bills does not reduce wealth or resources; it just increases the value of the remaining money supply. The punitive damages would still deter people from committing torts, without creating perverse incentives for potential plaintiffs or the agents of the state. (I’m joking, but only by half. Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this proposal?)
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Punitive Damages
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Rampant Speculation
Last weekend I went to Austin to see my sister graduate from the University of Texas (congratulations, Ellen!). During the visit with Mom, Dad, Glen, and Ellen, we had several conversations about English grammar, and just before they took me to the airport for my return flight, Dad was complaining about the strange vocabulary used by airline employees. Now for years, he's expressed his dislike of the word deplane, meaning "to disembark." ("To deplane should mean to remove planes from someone!") This time, though, he had an item that was new to me: the use of ramp to refer to what the rest of us call the runway or the tarmac. He said people in the industry could be quite adamant about using this term, and that he had even had a heated discussion on the subject with my uncle, who is a commercial pilot. My uncle's position: It's not made of tarmac! Dad's position: Even so, it's not a ramp!
I think calling a runway a ramp is just plain wrong, too, but my family expects me to put on my descriptive hat in situations like these, so I did.
"Well, Dad, I'm sure you wouldn't object if I told you that ramp can also mean a kind of wild leek found in Appalachia, would you?"
He said no. So he wasn't in principle against ramp being an ambiguous word. He (and I) could accept both the "inclined plane" and "wild leek" meaning for ramp, but not the "runway" meaning. Why not?
"So," I said, "when someone uses ramp to mean 'wild leek,' you accept that they have two meanings for the word. When they use it to mean 'runway,' which is hard and flat like a ramp, but doesn't have the one essential property of being an inclined plane, is the problem that it looks like they think they're dealing with a single concept, and they're not?"
"Yeah!" said Dad. "Exactly!" added Glen.
It made sense to me, too, but I wonder: How much in common with an inclined-plane-type ramp does any given object have to have before calling it a ramp triggers alarm bells for people like Dad and Glen and me? Is being human-made enough? What if a certain kitchen utensil were called a ramp? I think I'd be OK with it. Maybe human-made plus flatness is enough. Could a kind of bed be called a ramp? No, if I heard of a bed called a ramp, I'd wonder how you'd keep from sliding out of it. What about flatness all by itself? Could a plateau be called a ramp? No, I'd object to that in the same way as I do to calling a runway a ramp. Is having an incline sufficient? Could a soft, squishy slope of mud after a mudslide be called a ramp? I'd say no, since you can't move stuff up it; evidently, the function of helping move things is an essential part of the definition of ramp. I know plenty has been written on the question of "how alike do X and Y have to be before they can be denoted by the same word?" (for example, see this page about Eleanor Rosch, as well as all the current IT work on ontologies), but this question of "how alike do X and Y have to be before the differences between them preclude giving them the same name?" is one I haven't run into before.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Did Massachusetts "Legalize" Gay Marriage?
On the news this evening, reporters were saying that Massachusetts had “legalized gay marriage.” I know I’m splitting hairs here, but I think there is a subtle distinction to be made between recognizing gay marriages before the law and legalizing them. To “legalize” something usually implies that it was illegal before. But it was not against the law for gay people to make solemn vows to each other, to exchange rings, to have binding ceremonies, even to have religious weddings if they could find churches willing to perform them. What distinguished straight marriages from gay ones (and what still distinguishes them outside of Massachusetts) was that the former were legally recognized and granted certain privileges by the state, while the latter were largely ignored by the state. Gay marriages were analogous to private agreements that the courts declined to enforce. But declining to enforce an agreement is not the same as outlawing it.
Why belabor this point? Because if my reasoning is correct, then use of the word “legalize” in this context helps perpetuate the myth that the institution of marriage is and must be a creature of the state. Intimate relationships do not require the approval of the state to exist. Gay marriages exist right now, in every state in the union, and the only question is whether the people in them will receive equal treatment before the law.
Monday, May 17, 2004
Permissive Parents Beware...
...they eat brats in Ohio! (Only they pronounce it so that it rhymes with "rot," not "rat.")
Other food-related dialectological observations from my 12 years in Ohio:
What I have always known as a Reese's peanut butter cup is by and large known here as a Reesey cup. I think it's a little strange, but this guy seems to have some serious issues with it:
There once was a guy named Reese. He created a Peanut Butter Cup. He put his name on it. It became what we now know as Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.In response to his unsupported sociolinguistic observation: None of the people I've heard say it have been uncultured or rednecks, much less both at once.
Later they made an M&M -type candy and called it Reese's Pieces. This made sense because Reese's rhymes with pieces.
Let me repeat that: Reese's rhymes with pieces.
Reese's is not pronounced reecey. It does not rhyme with fleecy.
Please stop referring to your Reese's cup as a Reecey cup. It makes you sound like an uncultured redneck.
If you're in the produce section of a grocery store here, and see a sign for "mango fruit," they're not being redundant. For some of the population here, unless otherwise specified, mango means green pepper. And green pepper, BTW, means what I grew up calling a bell pepper. Nevermind that bell peppers come in yellow, red, and orange, or that jalapeno peppers are green--if you want bell peppers on your pizza here, you'd better ask for green peppers. Otherwise, the server might just hear the initial [b] and mark you down for banana peppers. That's what happened to me when I ordered my first pizza in Ohio, and it was quite an unpleasant surprise. (That and the fact that they had parmesan cheese all over the top of the pizza, and sliced it into rectangles!)
A popular breakfast item is sausage gravy and biscuits. The first time I saw this written down, it was on the dorm breakfast menu, written just like I wrote it here. I thought, "Great! I love sausage and biscuits! I'll ask them to hold the gravy." Another unpleasant surprise: The comma I'd mentally inserted between sausage and gravy had been left out on purpose! The dish is biscuits with gravy that's been made with sausage. Actually, I know that this term exists outside Ohio, because a regional restaurant chain named Bob Evans serves the dish.
In fact, all of the above terms may well be in usage outside Ohio. All I know is that I sure never heard them when I lived in Texas, and since I became aware of them in Ohio, I'm listing them here.
Apportioning Blame
In re: Abu Ghraib, Mark Kleiman notes that moral and legal responsibilities need not sum to one across parties; thus, holding one person (say, a prison guard) responsible for the abuse of prisoners does not imply letting another person (say, Donald Rumsfeld) off the hook. A valid point, I think. But then Mark applies his principle to a substantially different issue, concluding that food corporations and their consumers are jointly responsible for the ill effects of obesity.
Mark and I have scuffled on this point before. As I said then, the argument for holding consumers responsible for their own actions while holding corporations blameless (assuming they have not withheld relevant information) does not rely on the notion of moral/legal responsibilities summing to one. Rather, it relies on the notion that the consumer is the only person in a position to decide whether the activity in question is harmful on net, since the benefits and costs are ultimately subjective.
Mark’s position rests on the implicit notion that moral/legal responsibility and physical causality are the same. They are not. Using a physical “but for” test, my grandparents are responsible for every sin that I commit. But for my grandparents’ decision to procreate, I would not have existed and thus would have committed no sins. So they are certainly “responsible” for my sins in a physical sense. Similarly, if I stop a woman on the street to ask for directions, and as she walks away she gets crushed by a falling piano, I am physically “responsible” for her death. But for my having asked directions, she would have continued walking and been safely beyond the piano’s future point of impact. Yet few people would hold my grandparents responsible for my sins, and no one (I hope) would hold me responsible for the death-by-piano. Clearly, moral/legal responsibility and physical causality are not the same thing.
From a legal or moral perspective, the issue not determining physical causality, but giving appropriate incentives. To conclude that it makes sense to hold someone legally or morally responsible for an act, and to punish him for it, you have to believe the act is in fact a bad one. I am comfortable making that judgment about the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Holding more than one person morally responsible for the torture will make it that much less likely that it will happen again.
But with respect to the eating of jelly doughnuts, I’m not comfortable concluding that the act is in fact bad. Jelly doughnuts have good and bad effects whose relative value can only be compared by the subjective preferences of an individual consumer. Holding Dunkin Donuts responsible for the ill effects would probably lead to fewer jelly doughnuts being eaten, but that’s not necessarily a good outcome.
Friday, May 14, 2004
Full Disclosure
Of course, this site is also 62% good (there's no in between), but my purpose here is to avoid getting sued for inadvertently converting people to the dark side.
Also, it turns out you can reduce your evil intake by only reading the text (while ignoring headings and the right-side bar), which reduces the evil percentage to 35%. Also, you could stop reading Neal's posts, since it turns out they are 36% evil, while mine are only 25% evil. (I'm not sure how the math here works. I post a larger fraction of the material on this page, so the overall number should presumably be closer to my percentage than Neal's. But evil works in mysterious ways.)
Check out the Gematriculator for yourself.
Sign Me Up
Is it just me, or do the new enhanced MPAA movie ratings sound more and more like advertisements? Here’s the rating for Van Helsing:
Rated R for Non-Stop Creature Action Violence and Frightening Images, and for SensualityDude, I am so there! And here’s the rating for Mean Girls:
Rated PG-13 for Sexual Content, Language & Some Teen PartyingYeeeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!
And the Creep Goes On
Cigarettes, guns, fast food, and now booze. Alcohol is the next target of the nanny lawyers, as reported in USA Today. Here’s the wedge: they’re suing alcohol companies for “using slick advertising to sell products to underage drinkers.” Is there a connection to the previous lawsuits? Of course:
The plaintiffs' attorney in that case [against Miller and Anheuser-Busch], Steve Berman, represented Washington state in the tobacco settlement. Berman says his alcohol lawsuit "wholeheartedly" borrows reasoning used in tobacco cases.I won’t rehearse all the usual arguments against holding firms responsible for the voluntary choices of their customers. I have a different question this time: how can you distinguish between a marketing campaign that targets young people and a marketing campaign that targets older people who want to feel young? Marketing compaigns assuredly portray young and active lifestyles, but marketing images are often not about what people are, but what they want to be.
The lawsuits say that alcohol companies market to underage drinkers by running ads in magazines like Highlights and Teen People… wait, no, that’s not what they say. They say the companies market to underage drinkers by advertising in Maxim, FHM, Stuff, and Glamour. But, says an article from DIRECT (a marketing journal), the average age of Maxim and FHM readers is 27, with an income of $70,000; the average age of a Stuff reader is 25, with an income of $50,000 or more. I’m sure there are men under 21 reading these magazines, but they are not the center of the distribution. Assuming a normal distribution, for every 20-year-old reading Maxim, there is a 34-year-old to balance him. Admittedly, if the distribution’s not normal, then the median or modal reader might be closer to 21 years. But the point is that these magazines capture a range of ages that clearly goes far beyond the under-21 crowd.
Oh, and there are probably some 15-year-olds reading Maxim, too; should the auto companies pull their ads? Since when does the fact that people of a particular age cannot legally use something mean that they can’t legally be exposed to images of it?
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Evolutionary Question Begging
According to this article, handsome male features like high cheek bones may have evolved because of a shift in female mate-selection strategies. As the importance of physical dominance waned, females began choosing handsome males over aggressive males. Interesting, but also, I think, question-begging. The story assumes the attractiveness of high cheek bones. What makes high cheek bones inherently more attractive than sloping brows and enlarged canines? When aggressiveness was more important for survival, I’ll bet females found the large canines pretty hot. For a good evolutionary story, we would need to know what shaped perceptions of attractiveness.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Friendster vs. Fiendster
Last week, I finally got around to joining Friendster, after several friends told me it was worth checking out. Can’t say I’m blown away, but it is moderately interesting. It was probably more interesting back in the early days, when lots of people were trying it out for the first time and trying to expand their “friend networks” as much as possible. I sense that there is now a lull, except perhaps for whole groups of friends who are all just trying out Friendster for the first time.
Anyway, I was thinking about the mathematical properties and assumptions underlying the Friendster system. The implicit assumption is that friendship is a quasi-transitive operator: if A is friends with B and B is friends with C, then A is (sort of) friends with C. But the extent of friendship attenuates with the degrees of separation. We could imagine a friendship function F(n), where n is the degrees of separation. F(n) might have a form like so:
F(n) = k^nwhere k is some real number in the interval (0, 1]. If k = 1, then friendship is perfectly transitive: a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend is just like a friend. On the other hand, if k < 1, then friendship attenuates with distance.
And then I thought, what if someone started a new website called “Fiendster”? On this website, you would create a network of your enemies. You’d send your enemies Fiendster invitations: “Glen has invited you to be his enemy. Do you accept?” And then you could check out your enemies’ lists of enemies to find potential allies, working on the theory that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Mathematically, in this case k lies in the interval [-1, 0). For instance, we might have F(n) = (-.9)^n. This would mean that my enemy is my enemy to an extent of -.9, my enemy’s enemy is my ally to an extent of .81 (notice the sign change), my enemy’s enemy’s enemy is my enemy to an extent of -.729, and so on. Mathematical difficulties might arise if someone were both my enemy and the enemy of my enemy, because that person would be assigned both a positive and a negative number. In such cases, perhaps you would have to choose which of your enemies is the greater enemy. Or not – maybe the mathematical contradiction maps a real contradiction in human relationships.
Monday, May 10, 2004
Weighty Considerations
The comments on my previous post on obesity and overweightness got me thinking more about the issue. Specifically, Tim noted:
Obesity and anorexia are both bad things. People should have reasonable expectations for their body weight, and for an average-height woman, 100 pounds and 200 pounds are both unhealthy. The people prone to obesity are typically different from the people prone to unhealthy dieting. They have different problems, and therefore need to hear different messages.Fair enough, although I wonder if the messages are reaching the intended targets. Maybe the anorexics are hearing the anti-fat messages, while the obese people are hearing the anti-skinny messages.
Tim’s point also made me wonder about the prevalence of the different problems. In the previous post, I said the average American woman is 5’ 4” and 140 pounds. I assumed, given the recent reports that 60%+ of Americans are overweight or obese, that 140 pounds was too much for a 5’ 4” woman according to the new government standards. But I just plugged the numbers into a Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator, and it turns out that 5’ 4” and 140 pounds is in the government-approved range.
So what’s going on here? How can over half the public be fat, when the public still has an average weight that’s just fine? I can see a few possible explanations.
• First, the mean and median are not the same. It could be that, once the anorexics in the bottom 40% of the population are taken into account, their extreme underweightness balances out the top 60%’s overweightness to create a “healthy” mean, even though the median person is still overweight. But this strikes me as an unlikely explanation. It’s easier to be 200 pounds overweight than 200 pounds underweight; therefore, I would guess the weight distribution is positively skewed (much like the income distribution), leading to a mean that’s higher than the median, not lower.
• Second, a gender difference could resolve the paradox. Perhaps men are overrepresented in the overweight/obese category, meaning that a smaller percentage of women are overweight/obese. However, this fact sheet says that 61.9% of women over 20 years old are overweight/obese, so the paradox remains. (The percentage of men who are overweight/obese is indeed higher, though.)
• The comparison between the average woman figures and the percent overweight/obese figures is confounded by the latter being calculated based on BMI, which considers height as well as weight. Maybe there are a lot of short and fat women who still have relatively low weights compared to women of average or greater height, and their weights pull down the average even though they are overweight. I haven’t fully worked through the logic on this one, but my instinct is that it means short women must be more likely than tall women to be overweight.
• The “average woman” is not really an average woman, but an ideal woman according to the government’s standards.
Anyone who has the answer is invited to email it to me or put it in the comments box. Incidentally, nothing I’ve said here should be taken to mean I agree with the government’s standards for healthy BMI. Read this article to find out how the government actually changed the criteria, yielding a sudden jump in the number of people classified as overweight.
Friday, May 07, 2004
Uncanny
Mark Liberman's recent posting on the different meanings of can depending on how wide a scope it takes reminds me of my first brush with a scope ambiguity (though at the time I didn't know what it was called). It was back in my sophomore year in high school, in Linda Misenhimer's 6th period biology class. We were having a multiple-choice exam on our genetics unit, and one of the questions went something like this:
John has type AB blood, and Marsha has type B. What blood-type child can they not have?OK, I thought. If John contributes an A gene, and Marsha contributes a B, then their kid will be AB, so that's not the answer. If John contributes an B, and Marsha contributes a B, then their kid will have type B, so that's not the answer. What about type A? Well, John can certainly contribute an A gene, but the rest depends on Martha. If her genotype is BB, then their child will have to have type AB. On the other hand, if her genotype is BO, then she can contribute an O, and their kid will have genotype AO, and type A blood. So item C isn't the answer. That leaves item D, type O. For that to happen, both parents have to contribute an O gene, and since John is AB, that can't happen. Regardless of Marsha's unknown gene, they cannot possibly have a child with type O blood. The answer is D.
a. AB
b. B
c. A
d. O
I did well on the test, but I noticed that I'd lost two points on that question. After class, I asked why.
"You should have marked both C and D," Mrs. Misenhimer told me.
"But they can have a child with type A, if Marsha's genotype is BO," I said.
"Yes, but if Marsha's genotype as BB, then they cannot have a child with type A."
I didn't understand why this mattered. Until Martha's unknown gene was known, we could not rule out them having a type A kid, so why was I supposed to mark that answer? I asked. Mrs. Misenhimer clarified with her intonation:
"If Marsha's genotype is BB, then they can ... NOT-have a type A child!"
"But ... but ..." was all I could say.
I thought about it some more at home. I came to the realization that the problem was in how we were interpreting the can and the not. Like any other native speaker of English, I was interpreting them to mean, "not able to have," or using parentheses to represent it, NOT(CAN-HAVE). (As semanticists put it, not has wide scope over can.) But it was also possible to interpret them as "able to not have" (or if you don't like split infinitives, "able not to have"); using parentheses, CAN(NOT-HAVE). (In other words, not has narrow scope, and can has wide scope.) A less common interpretation, but sensible enough in context (for example, "Here's what I can do to annoy Jim. I can not laugh when he tells that joke he always tells."). The problem was that Mrs. Misenhimer wanted to have it both ways. She wanted the "not able to have" meaning to say that it was impossible for John and Marsha to have a type O kid, and the "able not to have" meaning to say that it was possible for John and Marsha to have a kid that was not type A. It all seemed so simple now! Geez, using her logic, I should have marked all the options, since it was also possible for John and Marsha NOT to have a type AB kid (if John contributed a B), and NOT to have a type B kid (if John contributed an A).
I went to Mrs. Misenhimer again the next day to point out the ambiguity, so she could see why her question was unfairly graded, and I could reclaim my two points. I wasn't grade-grubbing, you understand; this was an important semantic principle. Unless you're making a pun, you can't just claim every possible meaning of an ambiguous phrase as the one you intended. Imagine someone saying, "I could care less" and meaning both that they didn't care at all AND that they did care!
"I think I see where the confusion came from on this question," I said. "First, you agree that 'not able to' and 'able not to' mean different things, right?"
"No."
I couldn't argue any farther. I had to accept my grade of a 96 on the exam instead of a 98.
UPDATE: I've been thinking about it some more, and I realized that actually it's just barely possible that Mrs. Misenhimer was not trying to interpret the question two ways. The bizarre CAN(NOT-HAVE) interpretation of the question not only allows "type A" as an answer, but also my choice of "type O." That is, if it's impossible for John and Marsha to have a type O child, then it is trivially possible for them to not have a type O child. They CAN(NOT-HAVE) a type O child! But there's still a problem. Not only does the CAN(NOT-HAVE) interpretation allow choices C and D as answers; as I remarked above, it allows every choice as an answer!
So why was Mrs. Misenhimer looking for just answers C and D instead of all of them? The only interpretation I can come up with that requires "type O" and "type A" as answers but not "type AB" or "type B" is this:
What blood-type child is it possible for it to be impossible for John and Marsha to have?Let's go through the choices one by one. Type AB: it is not possible for it to be impossible for John and Marsha to have a type AB child, since it is a fact that John can contribute an A gene, and Marsha can contribute a B. Type B: it is not possible for it to be impossible for John and Marsha to have a type B child, since it is a fact that John can contribute a B, as can Marsha. Type A: it is possible for it to be impossible for John and Marsha to have a type A child; it is impossible in the case in which Marsha's genotype is BB. Type O: it is impossible for it to be possible for John and Marsha to have a type O child, since it is a fact that John's genotype is AB.
But seriously, that's not how can works, is it? No, the bottom line is this: Mrs. Misenhimer should have given me full credit on that question!
Thursday, May 06, 2004
Weight a Minute...
Is this a contradiction?
1. The nannies tell us that overweightness and obesity are on the rise. More than 60% of Americans are overweight or obese, they say.
2. The nannies (perhaps a different group of nannies) also tell us that the media have distorted the American vision of a desirable body. While the average model is 5’ 11” and 117 pounds, the average American woman is 5’ 4” and weighs 140 pounds.
Obviously, the height of models – and hence the height to weight ratio – is far out of reach for most people. But if the nannies are correct about overweightness, then the average weight for American women must be too high – so what business do they have using it as the appropriate benchmark when talking about body images?
On a related note, are these the same nannies who get huffy about fat jokes and consider it discrimination to charge fat people for two seats on an airplane? I try not to make fat jokes myself (though I admit that I’ve occasionally succumbed) because I consider other people’s eating and exercise choices their own damn business. But the food-nazis have been pressing the line that your weight is not your own business, but a pressing social issue. If they really believe that, shouldn’t they be encouraging more fat jokes, and higher airfares for fat people, as a means of increasing the psychological and economic costs associated with overweightness?
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Healthcare and the Tax Code
Tyler is puzzled by the usual economic argument against the tax treatment of health insurance. In a nutshell, the current system allows health insurance to be bought with pre-tax dollars, but direct purchases of healthcare products and services must be made with post-tax dollars. The usual economic argument, as stated by Glenn Hubbard, is that this system encourages a system of third-party payment in which consumers are rarely confronted with the true cost of their choices at the point of sale.
Tyler raises some tough questions about this line of argument. I’ll try to respond, while admitting that I (like Tyler) am not an expert in this field.
If the argument is that tax deductibility leads to too much health care, I can see the logic. But then the problem is in the pretzels and beer markets; health care should be doing fine, albeit in bloated form.A bloated healthcare market is indeed part of the problem. It seems likely that many Americans do purchase more healthcare services than they really need. But the bigger issue is that greater expenditures don’t necessarily translate into more health services. The fact that consumers cannot use untaxed dollars to buy healthcare directly creates a strong incentive to have as much of our healthcare as possible purchased through middlemen (the insurance companies), which at a minimum drives up administrative costs. Instead of you just handing a check to your doctor, your employer has to pay an insurance company, you and/or your doctor have to fill out reimbursement forms, and bureaucrats at the insurance company have to process the claims and payments. (Lest it seem like I’m arguing against insurance in general, I’m not – for low-risk high-consequence health events, insurance makes perfect sense for purposes of risk-spreading, despite the administrative costs. But for small and routine expenses, out-of-pocket payment is more sensible.)
In addition, there is an incentive problem created by third-party payment. Patients have no incentive to economize on their health purchases when someone else is paying at the point of sale. They tend to purchase more doctor visits, more hospital days, more name-brand medicines, more pain medication in the hospital, more physical therapy, etc., and they have no reason to ask if the price is right. More on this below.
Alternatively, it might be argued that buying health insurance involves a negative externality on others. Maybe insurance companies are intrinsically bad monitors, and more insurance corrupts the system as a whole.Tyler’s point, I think, is that the problem of uneconomical health purchases, brought on by third-party payments, could be solved through better cost monitoring. That’s true, but it creates problems of its own. First, the enforcement itself is costly, because it involves having insurance companies regularly reviewing and sometimes overruling the decisions of doctors and patients. Second, it engenders the animosity of doctors and patients, who don’t like having their decisions second-guessed. The essential purpose of an HMO is to ration healthcare by means of lines and bureaucracy instead of by price; hence the recent vilification of HMOs. Facing such resistance, the insurance companies can either (a) continue their monitoring and face the public’s wrath, (b) raise premiums, or (c) a little of both, which is what we’ve in fact observed.
Grant this premise, but where do we end up?Actually, the argument is for equalizing the tax treatment of health insurance and direct healthcare expenditures. One way to do this is to tax health insurance; the other is to remove the taxes on direct health expenditures. The latter approach would continue to subsidize healthcare relative to other goods and services, but it would get rid of the perverse incentive to get all healthcare through insurance companies. Either approach would be preferably to the status quo.
1. We would have a good argument for taxing insurance purchases. Yet the insurance point is rarely raised with this conclusion in mind. We might have (yikes!) an argument for greater government involvement in health care.
2. If insurance companies are such poor cost monitors, why doesn't this raise premia accordingly? The poor monitoring of the company would be reflected in policy price and thus would be internalized by the people or institutions who buy the policies. The externality should vanish or at least significantly diminish.See above points about cost monitoring. The bottom line is that even if there is substantial competition among insurance companies for institutional customers, the competitive price is still higher than it would be otherwise. Even the most efficient health insurance company can’t eliminate the administrative and enforcement costs entirely.
3. Why should insurance subsidies lead to "low copayments and deductibles"? Insurance with high copayments and deductibles is favored by the tax system as well. That being the case, why do we blame the tax system for how insurance is (perhaps) poorly structured?It’s not exactly true that the tax system favors high-copayment/low-deductible policies as well, because in general, such copayments and deductibles must by paid out of consumers after-tax dollars. Recent change in the tax code have made it possible to have limited Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs), which allow you to put aside some pre-tax dollars for copayments and deductibles. This is a move in the right direction. But my understanding – again, limited by lack of expertise – is that such MSAs have been hobbled by a variety of restrictions. For them to create the proper incentives, it must be possible to “roll over” any unused dollars into your general income, which to my knowledge is not possible in the status quo. The patient’s incentive is to use the dollars before they disappear.
All these points collapse into a more simple query: how can a simple relative price, whether a distortion or not, corrupt the cost control practices of an entire industry?The issue is not the distorted relative price between healthcare and other products and services. It’s the distorted relative price between health insurance and directly purchased healthcare. That, as outlined above, leads to higher administrative and enforcement costs.
And if government provision of health care is ineffective and costly, isn't there a positive externality from the purchase of private health insurance?Certainly, private insurance is better than government provision. But what would be even better is a combination of private insurance and private direct payment.
For more commentary on healthcare, much of it inspired by Gephardt’s plan, see my previous posts here, here, and here.
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Giving Credit Where It's Due Department
The Doonesbury strip from the Sunday before last featured a reporter calling Bush to task for supporting so many constitutional amendments:
Mr. President, you have always said you believed in strict constitutional constructionism … and yet you favor amending the Constitution to prevent gay marriage … and you favor another amendment to outlaw abortion, and another to criminalize flag-burning … and another one to balance the budget … and yet another to enshrine victims’ rights.With the possible exception of the balanced-budget amendment, I oppose all those proposals. But there is absolutely no contradiction between supporting constitutional amendments and favoring strict constitutional constructionism. The strict constructionist opposes reading one’s own opinions into the existing Constitution, not changing it. If you want the government to do something not specifically authorized, according to the strict constructionist view, proposing a constitutional amendment is the right way to go about it. I wish I could say this Bush administration was always this respectful of constitutionalism.
To be fair to Gary Trudeau, Bush is being disingenuous. He claims to believe in the principles of our Constitution – a claim belied by his willingness to (for instance) create a special loophole in freedom of speech to punish flag burners. But this contradiction has nothing to do with strict constructionism.
Monday, May 03, 2004
Fecal Meter
Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch reporter Barbara Carmen had a story in the Metro section yesterday about a notorious apartment complex just south of the airport. I’m always interested in stories about these apartments, since I lived in one of them for about a week back in 1993. It looks like the latest attempts at renovation aren’t going so well; Carmen had this to say about one tenant’s unit:
(1) Feces float on her living room floor when it rains.That sentence almost jumped off the page at me, it was such a poetic line in a column filled with ordinary prose. I even went to Poetry Daily and checked out a few poems there, to compare what “real” poetry looked like these days, and I’m telling you that Carmen’s one sentence had more poetry in it than the entire first two poems I read at Poetry Daily.
First, notice the [f] alliteration at the very beginning, in “feces float.” Effective metrical composition, too: “Feces” is two long syllables, both stressed, giving us a spondaic foot, encouraging the reader to slow down and dwell on the words. This effect is amplified by the long, stressed syllable of “float,” followed by a caesura—that is, a pause instead of the rest of a metrical foot.
Once we get past the caesura, the line quickly runs to its end in three anapestic feet: three sequences of two unstressed syllables and one stressed one, as shown here (note also the continued [f] alliteration):
(2) on her LIV/ing room FLOOR / when it RAINSAlliteration and a detectable meter, neat! I’ll have to be on the lookout for more of Barbara Carmen’s journalistic poetry.
Language as Signaling Mechanism
I’ve defended a mild form of linguistic prescriptivism in the past, but a distinct argument for linguistic prescriptivism has been running around in my head for a few weeks now, and Neal’s post below helped me finally pin it down. Neal said, among other things:
Ultimately, I had to concede to my wife that criticizing someone for thinking that “beg the question” means “induce one to ask the question” is little more than saying, “Ha, ha! I’ve read books on logic and you haven’t! I know the code and you don’t!”This reminded me of something Bill Poser said about a month ago:
Prescriptive grammar has very little to do with maintaining the clarity and precision of the language. What it really has to do with is maintaining the dominance of the upper classes and enforcing social norms. It used to be that only the wealthy had access to the kind of education that would provide knowledge of the particular type of English enshrined in the prescriptive standard, so discriminating against people who did not command this type of English helped to preserve class distinctions and to keep the lower classes in their place by making them believe that because they spoke differently they were inferior. This isn't as true as it once was, but the idea persists. Prescriptive grammar is a tool of the kleptocracy.Whoa, that’s harsh. The general message one might glean from Neal’s and Bill’s posts together is that many rules of grammar and style have no purpose but to keep certain people down while privileging the elite. (I should recognize that Neal’s position is not as extreme as Bill’s.)
I wonder if there might be a more charitable way of saying the same thing. Perhaps the rules of grammar and style perform a useful social function by providing signals about the educational backgrounds and effort levels of communicators. Consider the analogy to university education. One popular theory about such education is that it actually imparts useful knowledge to students and increases their productivity. That is, I hope, at least true to some extent. But another theory about education – one that I find increasingly plausible – is that it simply helps us to distinguish the more and less capable students. Someone who has graduated from college with a good GPA has (at least with some colleges) demonstrated a combination of native talent, work ethic, and persistence – all virtues that future employers value. Your degree is thus a signal of your productivity, even if getting the degree did not actually make you more productive.
For a signaling mechanism like education to work efficiently, there must be some cost of acquiring the positive signal, and the cost must be greater for the low productivity person than for the high productivity person. To put it simply, it must be harder for a low-talent person than for a high-talent person to graduate or get a good GPA. The valuable output of the signaling process is information about talent levels. I suspect that rules of grammar and style may perform a similar signaling role. To learn the rules, you need reasonably good instruction, and you must apply yourself to learn them. When you speak and write, listeners and readers acquire information about your education and work ethic.
It would be silly, of course, to judge a person ignorant or stupid on the basis of a single infraction of the rules. There are too many idiosyncratic rules for every person to learn every single one. I would not assume, for instance, that someone who uses “beg the question” to mean “induce one to answer the question” is uneducated. I might, however, infer (as Neal indicates) that the speaker had probably never studied logic. That inference might be buttressed by his reference to “ad homonym attacks.” The more errors (deviations from traditional usages) a person makes, the more confidence I have in my conclusions. This is similar to how I grade essays for style. I realize that style is unavoidably subjective, so I don’t subtract a standard number of points for each stylistic problem. Instead, I mark every stylistic problem I see, and then I make a holistic judgment of how badly written the paper was, taking into account the total number of red marks I see.
If my argument sounds elitist, that’s because it is. But it is an elitism grounded in information inferred from behavior, as opposed to irrelevant factors like sex or skin color. Most Americans do have the opportunity, if they apply themselves, to learn the basics of good writing and speaking. Indeed, learning to speak and write clearly, and in line with traditional rules, is probably one of the most accessible means of crossing class boundaries. Listeners should, of course, make exceptions for immigrants and others who cannot reasonably be expected to have fully absorbed the rules of the language. But the fact that a mechanism is imperfect does not imply that it has no use at all.
Sunday, May 02, 2004
Carrots, Sticks, and the Begging of Questions
Frequent commentator trumpit sent me the link to this LA Times article by Peter Garrison. In it, Garrison complains about how the idiom “to beg the question” has almost entirely lost its original meaning. These days, it is mostly used to mean, “to induce one to ask the question,” as in this typical example:
The Twins are up by five runs, and Lohse can't be sent back out there, and the real bullpen pitchers need a rest, but this still makes me nervous. Which begs the question, if you can't use him now, when can you use him? Which begs the question why is he in the major leagues? Which begs the question, what are Terry Ryan and Ron Gardenhire thinking? linkOriginally, “begging the question” meant to use a circular argument, i.e., one whose conclusion is sneakily used as one of the premises. Garrison is not alone in this complaint. These guys here make the same one, and I’ve been bugged by the newer usage for years.
I even complained about it to my wife one day, but she was not sympathetic. She had several points. First of all, “beg the question” in its original sense is certainly not a semantically transparent phrase. What connection is there between “begging a question” and “using an argument’s conclusion as one of its premises”? Actually, there is one, which Evan Morris (aka The Word Detective) states concisely:
It means to bypass or avoid an essential question, but to proceed as if it had already been answered.Even so, the semantic connection between begging and bypassing or avoiding is pretty tenuous, and not likely to be made by someone encountering this idiom for the first time.
Second: When someone does hear the phrase for the first time, they have every reason to treat it like any other English pharse, and create a meaning for it using their already-existing definitions for “beg” and “question.” Since you can’t actually beg a question to do something, guessing that it means to practically beg someone to ask some question is a pretty reasonable course to take.
Third: Of course, if they looked up the idiom, they’d find out what it meant, but as Geoff Pullum argues, you can’t look up everything . And why would you look up this phrase, anyway, once you’ve figured out a plausible meaning? It’s like when you get a bad grade because of some misunderstanding, and the teacher says, “If you didn’t understand, you should have asked me”—dammit, until I got this grade, I thought I understood perfectly! If someone says to you, “I eat bologna sandwiches,” are you going to look up the phrase “eat bologna sandwiches” to see if it’s an idiom?
Ultimately, I had to concede to my wife that criticizing someone for thinking that “beg the question” means “induce one to ask the question” is little more than saying, “Ha, ha! I’ve read books on logic and you haven’t! I know the code and you don’t!”
Returning to the LA Times article... Garrison generalizes his complaint, arguing that when terms for specific concepts lose their meaning, people are less likely to be aware of the concepts they denote. I have three things to say here. One: maybe, and maybe not. This claim is a version of what linguists call the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, whose validity has not been established. Second: in this particular case, Garrison needn’t worry, because there’s another, more semantically transparent term for the concept--circular argumentation. And third, what would he say in a case where the goals of preserving a term’s original meaning and having a term for a useful concept were in opposition? This brings me to the other topic of this post: carrots and sticks.
My dad has brought to my attention the rampant misinterpretation of “carrot and stick.” Whenever you read the phrase in editorials or hear people use it, they mean “simultaneous use of rewards (carrot) and punishment (stick) to produce a desired behavior.” A typical example:
Jeb Bush is proposing a carrot-and-stick approach: reward school districts that have already tried and punish those that fail. linkBut the phrase seems to have come from the image of dangling a carrot in front of a mule or donkey in order to get it to move forward in an attempt to get the carrot which is always just out of reach, as illustrated here and here. So the carrot is a reward (albeit an unreachable one), but the stick is just what keeps the reward out of reach, not an instrument of punishment. Evan Morris comments on the commonly used meaning for this phrase, too, here. In fact, it seems that even knowing of the origin of the phrase is not enough to keep the newer meaning at bay, as this cartoon shows.
Now I can definitely see Dad’s point, but what I haven’t had the heart to tell him is this: I think the phrase “carrot and stick” is more useful where it is now. First of all, you can’t look up everything. If you’re not familiar with the image of a carrot and stick used with a donkey, what are you going to think when you hear about motivating someone with a carrot and stick? I’d probably think of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” and get the rest from context. Second, if everyone were to start using “carrot and stick” strictly in its original sense tomorrow, we would lose a convenient, short way of referring to a simultaneous use of rewards and punishment to produce a desired behavior, a concept that is useful in describing many situations. What would we gain in return? A convenient, short way to refer to one particular means of motivating a donkey or mule.
Which meaning would you rather have for "carrot and stick"?
Friday, April 30, 2004
The Air Down There
According to an old (possibly apocryphal) story, economist Armen Alchian was once asked the following question: “If you could wave a magic wand and eliminate all of the pollution in South Central Los Angeles, would you do it?” To which Alchian allegedly replied, “No. It would be cruel to raise those people’s rent like that.”
I usually tell that story to my students just to jolt them into thinking differently (that is, like an economist) about environmental issues. But lately I’ve been wondering if Alchian’s comment might be even more insightful than I’d realized. Environmentalists sometimes get lathered up about “environmental injustice” or “discriminatory pollution,” meaning the location of pollution in regions populated by poor people and minorities. If we take Alchian’s point seriously, the problem is bogus, because the market rental rate for apartments and homes in the affected regions falls enough to reflect the undesirable effects of pollution. And taking the argument one step further, what this means is that the real victims of pollution are not the residents, but the land owners who get paid lower rents. The value of their land diminishes.
But taking the argument yet another step, perhaps even the current land owners are not the real victims, so long as the pollution has been around for a while. Consider the analogy to a property tax. A property tax reduces the value of the property, because the owner is obligated to pay a stream of future taxes. When the tax is imposed for the first time, the current owner suffers a reduction in the price for which he can sell his land, because it’s now burdened with a tax liability that is capitalized into the land’s value. But if he sells the land to a new owner, the new owner does not take a hit, because the tax liability is reflected in the lower price. Yes, it appears that the new owner suffers, because he must pay property taxes – but if not for the taxes, he would have paid a higher price for the property. The price differential should be approximately equal to the present discounted value of the stream of tax payments. In effect, a property tax is borne entirely by the land owner at the time of the tax’s imposition.
The analogy to pollution should be clear. If there is an increase in pollution in a particular region, and that increase is expected to be permanent, then the cost of the pollution gets capitalized into the land value. The owner at the time of the pollution increase suffers, but subsequent owners do not, because they are compensated by the lower sale price. Subsequent owners suffer new damage only from further increases in the pollution burden. Renters suffer damages during the period in which their rent remains at the level set prior to the increase in pollution.
I haven’t worked all the way through the logic, but my suspicion is that these considerations don’t really change the economist’s prescriptions for how to deal with externality problems. For most economists, the key question is whether the gains from the polluting activity are greater than the reduction in value of all the affected land. A policy allowing current owners or renters to sue for damages might (and I emphasize might, because I’m leaving out a lot of relevant caveats) internalize the externality and produce the efficient outcome. But interestingly, my analysis above indicates that this policy would be awarding damages to people who may not have suffered any actual (uncompensated) harm. On the other hand, if such a policy already existed at the time of the purchase of the land, that, too, would be capitalized into the sale price – this time by raising it. The higher price would be compensated by the expectation of a future legal settlement.
If there’s a policy implication of my speculation here, I think it probably comes down to this: In the absence of substantial administrative costs, the following two policies would have equivalent effects: (a) a policy that allows current owners and renters to sue for damages from new or existing pollution, and (b) a policy that allows only owners at the time of a permanent increase in pollution to sue for damages from pollution. But in the presence of administrative costs, (a) would involve lawsuits every year, whereas (b) would allow all lawsuits to be handled just once, thereby minimizing administrative costs. On the other hand, (a) and (b) might only be equivalent when the benefits and costs from the polluting activity are relatively constant over time, thus assuring that pollution that’s efficient when it first appears continues to be efficient thereafter. If the costs and benefit change substantially over time, (a) might handle better the need for change in pollution levels.
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Rape Inflation
In today’s Dear Abby, a 17-year-old complains about her boyfriend who wants to have sex all the time. At the end of her letter, she says:
The other day, I told Johnny I didn’t want to do it, but it happened anyway. I didn’t resist, so it wasn’t like he raped me or anything, but it wasn’t right.And here is part of Abby’s reply:
And I have more bad news – when a person says "no" to sex and it “happens anyway,” that is the definition of rape.A charitable interpretation of Abby’s remarks is that she thinks the writer may have been raped, and RAINN can help her figure out if she was raped or not. But as I read it, Abby’s saying a rape did occur and RAINN can help her to realize that’s what happened.
I urge you to pick up the phone and call the R.A.I.N.N (Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network)… They can help you to clearly understand what happened and find counseling.
The writer never indicates that she said “no.” All she says is that she didn’t want to have sex. I’m sorry, but merely having sex when you don’t feel like it does not count as rape. Lots of people consent to have sex just to make their partners happy. If you don’t want to go to work in the morning, but it happens anyway, that’s not slavery, that’s life. Sometimes people do things they’d rather not do. Now, maybe she did say “no” but neglected to mention that fact to Abby. Possible, but the only evidence provided points exactly in the other direction: the writer expressly states that she was not raped. Instead of assuming the writer doesn’t know what rape is, why not take her at her word? Rape is a serious accusation, and it shouldn’t be thrown around in situations where all indications point to the guy just being a jerk.
Abby would be on stronger ground if she had focused on statutory rape. The writer called herself “Too Much Sex in Victorville,” and the only Victorville I know of is in California, where the age of consent is 18. The writer doesn’t state Johnny’s age, and in any case, I’m not sure whether California has an exception for minors having sex with other minors. (If there is no such exception, and two minors have sex with each other, are both guilty of statutorily raping each other?) With statutory rape, consent is not germane, so the whole “no” issue is beside the point.
For more on what’s rape and what’s not, read Dan Savage’s trenchant comments here and here.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
A Troop of One
This was the headline on the front page of the Columbus Dispatch today:
(1) Blast kills 2 U.S. troops.The names of the two soldiers were not given, but before I get to my linguistic point, let me say that the families of these soldiers have my sympathy, and all the troops have my respect and appreciation for the dangerous job they’re doing on my behalf.
Now about this headline talking about "2 troops": The definition I had for troop for many years was essentially this one (definition 1a in Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary): “a group of soldiers.” In high school, I gradually began to realize that this definition was not sufficient to let me understand some of the sentences I was hearing or reading with the word troops in them. During my U.S. history class in 9th grade, I remember hearing about how President Kennedy had sent some number of troops (I don’t remember the number, but say 50,000) into Vietnam, and wondering, “OK, so how many people does that translate to? 50,000 times…what? Fifty soldiers per troop? A hundred?” The textbook never made it clear. By about halfway through college, it was finally dawning on me that troops could also (and usually did) mean just "members of the armed forces," so 50,00 troops simply meant 50,00 soldiers.
I see that this definition has been around long enough that it is definition 1c in the same dictionary quoted above: “armed forces: SOLDIERS – usu. used in pl.” The last four words are the kicker: “usually used in plural.” Ye-e-e-es, exactly. So on the one hand:
(2) 1 troop = X soldiers, where X > 1 (and probably a 2- or 3-digit number)But on the other hand:
(3) 50,000 troops = 50,000 soldiersDividing both sides of equation (3) by 50,000, we get:
(4) 1 troop = 1 soldierNow clearly that can’t be right, can it? Somewhere between 1 and 50,000, there must be some number N such that (N-1) troops means some number of soldiers greater than N-1, and N troops means N soldiers. For years, I’ve been wondering what this number is, lowering it now and again as I come across other examples of lower and lower numbers of troops. And now that I’ve learned that 2 troops can mean 2 people, it looks like I’ve reached the limit.
Or have I? I’ve just done a Google search for the phrase “one troop,” and found at least one attestation in which 1 troop = 1 soldier:
One troop was shot in the leg this morning in a TERRORISM CRACKDOWN inspired by DONALD RUMSFIELD and FOX NEWS CHANNEL.I found plenty of examples in which troop referred to a group of people (most of them boy scouts or girl scouts), and some in which the ambiguity really causes confusion. In this one, I just couldn’t tell whether the one troop and the other troop consisted of one person each, or more than one person each, or a combination:
link
During further attacks on the strongpoint, one troop engaged enemy from the south, enabling the other troop to cross the wire and the minefield. After a brief encounter one troop entered the strongpoint and the enemy surrendered.And looking further in my Google search, I see my point has been anticipated by columnist Debra Lo Guercio, in a funny piece with a much more prescriptive slant, here.
link
There's No Such Thing as a Free Ice Cream Cone
Julian alerts us to Ben & Jerry’s annual Free Cone Day. “TISATAAFICC” (There Is Such a Thing as a Free Ice Cream Cone), he says, playing off Robert Heinlein’s TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch) slogan.
Julian’s only joking, as I'm sure he realizes the slogan doesn’t mean that you personally always pay, but that someone always pays. B&J’s pays the cost of production and (most likely) classifies it as a marketing expense. But in this case, it turns out that the free cone recipients have to pay, too. I went to a B&J’s store a few years ago on Free Cone Day, and I ended up waiting about an hour in line to get my free cone. That could be a pretty steep price for someone with a high opportunity cost of their time. In retrospect, it would have made more sense to just a buy a pint at the convenience store.
Incidentally, Heinlein actually didn’t invent the TANSTAAFL slogan (though he may have been responsible for the acronym version). Here’s the origin of the saying.
Monday, April 26, 2004
Oral Expression in French
Geoff Pullum of Language Log recently posted about one brief shining moment when he successfully deployed his limited Finnish well enough to sound like a fluent speaker. It reminded me of my favorite story of about speaking French. It was back in the summer of 1990 … [harp music, picture getting wavy]
Glen and I were traveling in Europe, staying in youth hostels (well, trying to stay in them, but that’s another story) and other cheap lodgings. It was a Friday night, and we had just ridden the ferry from Dover, England to Calais, France. We got there at about midnight. Glen and I had heard about a campground in the area, and luckily, this was one of the lodgings we were actually able to find (after an hour of hiking through an industrial district). The check-in office was closed, though, and besides, it turned out we didn’t have enough money to stay there—as usual, we’d gotten caught on a Friday night without having converted enough of our travelers’ checks to the local currency, and all the money exchanges were closed. So we decided we’d just have to sneak in through one of the broken bars in the fence that surrounded the grounds, and sleep in shifts in the open air.
The campground was a flat, sandy park, partially surrounded by low terraces. The one we chose was slightly elevated on a low hill from the rest of the camp, and from it we could keep an eye out for possible security guards. On the other side of the fence, the hill descended about fifteen feet to a broad parking lot outside the camp, and beyond was the shore, so we had a good view of what was going on all around us. Glen agreed to be the first to sleep, so he spread out one of the sleeping bags next to a bench that sat in the middle of the terrace, shoving our bags underneath the bench. After two hours, I woke Glen and we switched places. I pulled off my shoes and climbed into the sleeping bag as he began his watch.
"Neal, wake up!" was the next thing I heard. "Someone's coming!"
Oh, great, I thought, it's a guard come to throw us out. Well, I'd better get ready to speak some polite French with him. Glen pointed to the approaching figure, and it wasn't a guard at all. It was a man, coming not from the campground, but from the parking lot below. I recognized him: It was a dark-complexioned, black-haired guy I'd seen on the beach during my watch. We kept watching as he walked up the sidewalk toward the terrace, as it became apparent that he was indeed aiming for us. Finally he appeared at the edge of the terrace.
"Bon soir," I said. Glen stood at a distance, watching.
"Bon soir," the man said. He walked over to the bench and sat down. He seemed to be in his mid-twenties, was clean shaven and had dark eyes. I was still sitting up in the sleeping bag, making sure I could still feel my wallet in my pocket.
He introduced himself--his name was Luigi--and made friendly conversation. Not wanting to antagonize him, I conversed. I learned that he had an Italian name because he was, in fact, Italian, but was working here at some nightclub. He learned that Glen and I were brothers, and seemed a little surprised. The conversation continued with lots of small talk, and I began to wonder if Luigi had a point. I kept making sure I knew where my wallet was and where the travelers' checks were stashed; Glen kept walking around on the patio, keeping an eye on us. As Luigi sat and talked, I began to get annoyed. How long did he plan to stay? Why was he just sitting here and talking with a total stranger? What did he want? Didn't he know we were trying to sleep?
I was still sitting in the sleeping bag when Luigi pointed to my shoes and said something about them. I didn't catch exactly what he said, but I did hear chaussures, so I said yes, those were my shoes. Then he shook his head, pointed again, and I realized he was indicating the foil-like lining of the sleeping bag that was visible next to the shoes. Ah, I must have heard him say not chaussures, but chaud. He was asking if the sleeping bag was hot, probably impressed with the hi-tech lining. So I said sure, it was pretty warm, thinking that this was about the most pointless turn the conversation had yet taken. Luigi reached down from the bench to the sleeping bag and felt the lining with the back of his hand. What, I was thinking, he just has to see for himself how incredibly warm the lining is? Then he reached into the sleeping bag and I finally got the picture.
I jumped out of the sleeping bag, sat on the opposite end of the bench from Luigi, and started putting on my shoes. There was an awkward silence. Then Luigi turned to me and asked,
"Tu veux faire sucir?"
Did I want to what? I couldn't believe I’d heard him right, though I guess at this point I should have. They hadn’t taught the verb sucir in my high school French class, or even in my advanced oral expression French class at college. But I remembered it from a pornographic French novel I’d read, so after asking him to repeat the question, I answered, "Euh…non, merci."
There was another awkward pause. Luigi asked, "Moi a` toi?" (Me to you?)
No, that didn't really change things. "Non."
He was silent for a little longer, and then he nodded in Glen's direction. "Et lui?"
I didn't ask Glen before I told Luigi, "Lui non plus" (Him neither).
Luigi nodded, said, "Tant pis" (too bad), got up, and wandered back the way he'd come.
"What was that all about?" Glen wanted to know. I waited until Luigi was back on the parking lot below, making his way to the beach, before I told him.
Meaningless Driving Statistics
This MSN article reports the results of a focus group composed of 30 bad drivers (people with a large number of accidents or traffic violations in the three years). The article contains a plethora of totally meaningless statistics, including:
• 77% of bad drivers say they frequently or occasionally talk on cell phones while driving.
• 60% of bad drivers say they frequently or occasionally eat while driving.
• 60% of bad drivers say they get frustrated when SUVs or other large vehicles obstruct their vision.
• Nearly all bad drivers say they change their driving behavior when they know police are nearby.
• 93% of bad drivers say they listen to the radio while driving.
“If your answers agree with the answers from the focus group,” says the article, “it's likely you tend to be a more aggressive driver than average.” But the figures given show nothing of the sort, because they provide no point of comparison. The article provides no comparable figures for a control group of typical drivers, and therefore we have no idea whether the bad drivers’ percentages are relatively large or not. I wouldn’t be surprised, for instance, to find out that 93% of all drivers listen to the radio, or that 60% of all drivers occasionally eat while driving. And just about everyone I know drives extra carefully when police are around.
The point is not, of course, that none of these behaviors are dangerous. The point is that we need more information in order to distinguish the truly dangerous activities from the innocuous ones.
Friday, April 23, 2004
Black Is White, Up Is Down...
As a result of the California state budget crunch, the CSU system has taken some hits. Its funding from the state has been reduced, and fees – i.e., tuition – have had to increase. Naturally, the California Faculty Association (the teachers’ union of which I am an unwilling member) vigorously opposes all this. I received a CFA flyer in my mailbox this week announcing a rally against cuts, and one of its slogans has been sticking in my craw for a couple of days now: “Fee Increases ARE Tax Increases.”
That’s not just an overstatement; it’s about as nearly opposite the truth as I can imagine.
First, taxes are involuntary payments, usually made irrespective of whether the payer receives any service in return. Fees, or at least these fees, are voluntary payments (you only pay them if you attend a CSU institution), and the payer is the direct recipient of the educational benefits.
Second, CSU students receive a massive subsidy. According to some estimates, it costs around $10,000 per academic year to enroll one student full time, whereas the fee is about $2400. So the typical student is receiving a subsidy of about 75% off the cost of education. A fee increase is not a tax; it’s a reduction in the size of the subsidy. When people say student fees have increased by 58% in recent years, they’re referring to the fact that fees used to be around $1500 and have risen to about $2400. To put that in perspective, the size of the subsidy has dropped from about 85% to about 75%. (Incidentally, these figures don’t take into account inflation. In real dollars, the percentage increase would be a good bit less than 58%.)
Third, for the actual taxpayers, a fee increase is an alternative to a tax increase. If the fees did not increase, the only way CSU could keep its funding would be through increased taxes or borrowing (and of course, borrowing just means more taxes from future taxpayers). Raising fees is thus a way to avoid taxing the rest of public – you know, all those people who are not getting a heavily subsidized education – even more.
Thursday, April 22, 2004
Brain Politics
Tyler Cowen links to a fascinating article about how the brain reacts to stimuli of a political or ideological nature.
At the start of the session, when they look at photographs of Mr. Bush, Mr. Kerry and Ralph Nader, subjects from both parties tend to show emotional reactions to all the candidates, indicated in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with reflexive reactions.The research is really too preliminary to reach any political conclusions; as Tyler notes, there were only 11 data points. But what the heck – what’s a blog for, if not for throwing out half-baked ideas? Here’s what I’m thinking: this is yet another argument for divided government. When one party controls both the executive and legislative branches, the members of the party respond emotionally to most policy proposals, and nobody with power is thinking rationally about them. With divided government, there will always be someone in power who will think rationally about the other side’s proposals. This is, perhaps, why the Republicans only discover their limited government principles when there’s a Democrat in the White House.
But then, after the Bush campaign commercial is shown, the subjects respond in a partisan fashion when the photographs are shown again. They still respond emotionally to the candidate of their party, but when they see the other party's candidate, there is more activity in the rational part of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. "It seems as if they're really identifying with their own candidate, whereas when they see the opponent, they're using their rational apparatus to argue against him," Professor Iacoboni said. [emphasis added]
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
If You Turn the Gun on Yourself, Do You Have to Shoot It?
I always pause and think for a second when I read or hear news stories that contain sentences like this one:
(1) He killed 3 people before turning the gun on himself.Those of you who know me personally may be guessing that my reaction is, “I didn’t know you could turn a gun on! I’ve never seen a power switch on one!” Well, you’re right, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. Another reaction, of course, is disgust with the actions of the killer, but I don’t want to talk about that either.
I’m wondering why it is that the expression to "turn a gun"on oneself always seems to imply that the gun wielder also (a) fires it, (b) hits the target, and (c) dies from the wound. I mean, Dad always told me, “Don’t point a gun at anyone unless you are planning to kill him,” but not everyone follows this rule. Plenty of people turn guns on people (including themselves) and only threaten to fire them. And even those who do follow the rule, and turn guns only on those they mean to kill, can still miss. Furthermore, even those who hit their target (self or otherwise) might fail to deliver a fatal shot. I know that turned the gun on himself doesn’t have to mean “killed himself,” because I can say this:
(2) He turned the gun on himself, but decided not to fire it.I did a Google search for “turn the gun on”, “turned the gun on”, and “turning the gun on” and examined the first 3 pages of hits for each search. Of the 60 relevant examples I found, 53 of them (96%) were followed by a reflexive pronoun (himself, herself, etc. –mostly himself), and of these 53, only two were not clear cases where turning the gun on oneself meant killing onself. Even in these two cases, though, the gunmen actually did kill themselves, but that detail was made explicit later on, instead of being implied by the turn the gun phrase. Here they are:
(3) Gonzalez then turned the gun on himself and committed suicide.Of the 7 examples that mention turning the gun on someone other than oneself, 5 of them mean killing that someone. And as with the turn-gun-on-self cases, in the remaining two turn-gun-on-someone-else examples, the gunmen actually did kill their victims, but that fact was made explicit elsewhere.
(4) Deculit turned the gun on himself. "He blew his brains out," Witkowski said.
So overall, then, if you read that someone turned a gun on someone , chances are near 100% that the second someone got killed. OK, so far so good. Now how about this:
(5) He killed 3 people before pointing the gun at himself.Now the killer probably survived, maybe surrendering, or being disarmed by the police. Why doesn’t this sentence imply the same thing as (1)? Well, I have one pretty good reason. Larry Horn talks about this kind of situation as the Division of Pragmatic Labor. As it applies here, we’re used to hearing turn the gun on as a synonym for “shoot and kill,” so if someone deliberately chooses a less common phrasing, the audience infers that the speaker is trying to convey some message that would not be conveyed simply by using the more common phrasing. In this case, the message is, “He only pointed the gun; he didn’t actually fire it.” But now my question is: Why did turn the gun on become the more common way of expressing the idea of “shoot and kill”, while point the gun at did not? I’m assuming it was just a random thing, but if someone knows different, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
Oh, by the way: I also learned during the Google search that you can turn a gun on, as demonstrated in examples like this:
(6) If you simply turn the gun on, it will automatically default to standard semiautomatic mode.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
The Trade-Offs of Style
Many of the rules of grammar and style you learned from your high school English teachers are pointless and stupid – a point the folks at Language Log have made repeatedly. I don’t oppose all linguistic prescriptivism (see here and here), but there’s no doubt that many of the most common prescriptions are ridiculous. One example came to mind while I was grading some student essays. I noticed a significant fraction of students insisted on using constructions such as, “A regression analysis was performed…,” and “Conclusions were reached that….” Why not just say, “I performed a regression,” and “I conclude that…”? Because somewhere along the line, they had English teachers who told them never, ever to use the first person. As these examples show, following that admonition strictly means violating another English teachers’ admonition, which says never to use the passive voice.
Both prescriptions serve a legitimate goal. Students permitted to use the first person will often litter their writing with I’s, even where they’re totally unnecessary – e.g., “I found an article by John Smith arguing that…” instead of “John Smith argues that….” And students permitted to use the passive voice will use it to avoid stating who did what – e.g., “Mistakes were made” instead of “Administration officials made mistakes.” But it’s nearly impossible to follow both rules strictly without writing some incredibly awkward sentences, which is why both should be regarded as rules of thumb. I don’t recall a single one of my English teachers admitting that. I suspect the problem stems from one or more of the following: (1) Some English teachers don’t understand the rationales for the rules. (2) English teachers who understand the rationales don’t think students will understand them. (3) English teachers need hard-and-fast grading rules, lest their marks appear arbitrary. I’m sympathetic to this last reason, which is one reason I’m much happier grading math than writing. But if you’re going to teach English properly, there’s no avoiding the burden of subjectivity in grading.
Addendum: The previous sentence was supposed to be the last, but then I noticed it began with the word “but.” That’s another English-class no-no that I break without remorse. If I didn’t break it, a lot more of my sentences would be run-ons. See? Another trade-off. D’oh! That was a sentence fragment…
Sunday, April 18, 2004
Game Show Theory
A couple of years ago I was a contestant on Win Ben Stein’s Money. I didn’t win, but my name got put into the producer’s file of “good game-show contestant types.” As a result, I’ve been asked a couple of times since then to audition for other game shows. A couple of weeks ago, I auditioned for an upcoming show called “On the Cover,” and in so doing I figured out some interesting things about the selection process.
In both shows’ auditions, the first step was a 30-question quiz. After the quiz had been graded, the producer read the names of those who had “passed,” and everyone else was dismissed. But neither time did he reveal the number of correct answers that were required in order to pass. During the “Ben Stein” audition, I wondered why not. During the “On the Cover” audition, the reason became clear. Before giving the quiz, the producer explained to the participants why cheating on the quiz (say, by looking at your neighbor’s answer sheet) would be a bad idea. Show contestants, he said, are matched against others with similar scores on the quiz. If you cheat, you might increase your chance of being on the show, but only by increasing your chance of getting trounced in front of a national audience.
And that’s when I realized the reason for the secret pass-bar: If people knew the pass-bar, they might deliberately miss questions in order to get matched against inferior contestants. If the pass-bar were 20, for instance, and if you knew the answers to at least 25 questions, you might deliberately miss four (or if you're really confident, five) of them. The secret pass-bar makes it more difficult to game the system that way. (Though not impossible; if you knew the answers to all 30, you might guess you could safely give wrong answers to two or three, because it’s hard to imagine the pass-bar being set that high.)
But why should the producers care whether people end up mismatched? The obvious reason is that a close game is more interesting to watch. The more important reason, I suspect, is monetary. In a game where a single person has a chance to win a large prize while the runner-ups get a pittance (as was the case on “Ben Stein” and will be the case on “On the Cover”), matching the best contestants against each other reduces the expected cost of prizes, because only one of them can go home with the big prize. Matching the worst contestants against each other increases the number of episodes in which the big prize is not awarded.
As an added bonus, “departing contestants” like me can console ourselves with the knowledge that we were pitted against known equals (or near-equals), not just a random draw from the contestant pool.
Friday, April 16, 2004
A Child's Garden of Versus
A week or two ago, Doug was contemplating the fun he and his cousin could have if they could get together and do a two-player round of one of his videogames. He said:
(1) My Ice could verse his Flame.
Oho! I thought. A previously undetected misanalysis has now revealed itself!
The first I encountered the word versus was when the movie Kramer vs. Kramer came out. I was in 5th grade, so I could read the word on the movie posters at the same time as I was hearing it, and I never had a chance to interpret it as a 3rd person present tense of some unfamiliar verb. But Doug, who has spent a good it of time playing games on his Nintendo 64, has heard versus on numerous occasions. In particular, there's one game called "Super Smash Brothers," with all the characters from all the Nintendo games engaged in a big tournament, and at the beginning of every round, the announcer will say, "Mario versus Pikachu!" or "Link versus Jiggly Puff!" or something similar. If I were 5 years old, and heard the formula "X versus Y," without seeing it written down (or knowing how to read it if I did see it), what would the more rational conclusion be? That there is some weird preposition that I've never heard anywhere else, used only when two people are fighting, or that there is a verb, verse, which means "to fight"? Option B, of course! And all this time, when Doug and I talked about Mario vs. Pikachu, little did I know that I was saying Mario versus Pikachu while he was saying Mario verses Pikachu. Only now has our difference in understanding come to light. Who knows how many other differences like these are camouflaged, just waiting for the right kind of sentence or context to reveal them?
As with Doug's use of like (in a previous post), I expect we'll see more and more use of verse as a verb meaning "to fight" as Doug's generation grows up.
UPDATE: My prediction seems to be on the mark, at least judging by something Glen passed along to me:
[One of Glen's colleagues] says that the use of verse as a verb meaning "compete against" seems pretty common among young people. She said her son, who is about 9, uses it sometimes, and she's heard his friends use it, too. She said her son now understands the correct (or original) meaning of versus ... but that doesn't stop him from employing the new usage from time
to time.
Thursday, April 15, 2004
Electoral Collage
Showtime is going ahead with its plan to air "The American Candidate," a reality show in which contestants vie to become the people's candidate to run for president. The contestants will be eliminated from the show Survivor-style. But I can already see one little bitty problem. According to the website, you can enter the contest if you're 18 years or older. Oops. According to the Constitution of the United States, you must be at least 35 to be eligible for the presidency. A quick search reveals at least 25 people under 35 who have entered the contest. (To be fair, those who are 34 might be 35 by inauguration day, and the website only implies that we're talking about the 2004 election.)
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Pleasure and Pain
A nutrition brochure I was reading said something along these lines:
(1) To lower your risk of cancer, enjoy 3 to 5 servings of fruit per day.
So if you've just been choking down your daily servings of fruit for the health benefit, this message seems to say, too bad for you. It's not enough just to eat the fruit--you have to enjoy it, too.
Of course, the writers were really just using enjoy as a synonym for eat, and trying to put a positive spin on it. Actually, it's used as a more general synonym for have, as seen in this example:
(2) American citizens enjoy the right to vote.
The main thought is just that American citizens HAVE the right to vote, and by the way, they in general like having it. This synonym usage goes away, though, when we start talking about individual people, as in:
(3) Glen enjoys the right to vote.
This sentence means that by golly, Glen takes pleasure in exercising that right!
I've identified one other verb that's used this way, and it's a near-opposite of enjoy: suffer from. It is used as a synonym for have in the following sentence, with a negative spin on the having:
(4) 50 million Americans suffer from hemorrhoids.
This could just mean that 50 million Americans HAVE hemorrhoids. (In fact, I'm almost certain it does mean this.) But on the other hand, the speaker could conceivably mean that of all the 60 million or so Americans who have hemorrhoids, 50 million of them actually suffer from them. The other 10 million who are indifferent or who kinda like them are not being discussed. Interestingly, this synonym usage doesn't go away when we're talking about specific individuals. In (5), suffers from still just seems to mean has:
(5) Kim suffers from hemorrhoids.
I wonder what happens if I replace suffer from in (4) with enjoy ?
(6) 50 million Americans enjoy hemorrhoids.
Now we get the ordinary, non-specialized meaning of enjoy. The sentence tells us nothing at all about how many Americans actually HAVE hemorrhoids; it just says that 50 million Americans derive pleasure from hemorrhoids, perhaps by having them, or maybe by looking at them, collecting them, or something else.
These examples remind me of a similar situation with adjectives, in sentences like this:
(7) Our friendly employees will be happy to assist you.
But our surly ones won't, I always want to add. If they were describing the employees with a relative clause, they could avoid the ambiguity by using commas, like this:
(8) Our employees, who are friendly, will be happy to assist you.
In (8), the friendliness is definitely a "by the way" piece of information, packaged in a non-essential relative clause. If the smart-ass interpretation of (7) were to be phrased with a relative clause, it would be one not set off by commas, like this:
(9) Our employees who are friendly will be happy to assist you.
But enjoy and suffer from are different from these adjectives or relative clauses. "By the way" information carried by adjectives or non-essential relative clauses can be deleted from the sentence without changing the main idea; thus, you could say Our employees will be happy to assist you, leaving out the friendly, but still getting the main message across. But in enjoy and suffer, it's built right into the verb itself, and can't be removed without wrecking the sentence.
UPDATE: Mark Liberman has written more about enjoy and suffer from at Language Log, and his posting reminded Q. Pheevr of a quotation from Pippi Longstocking that shows Astrid Lindgren suffered from the same kind of literal-minded streak that I do.
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Popperian Astrology
Here is a great story about science versus mythology (link courtesy of Crooked Timber). Here’s the short version (or as close I can come to short): Astrologer Thomas Seers claimed that astrology could be taught in a science class. Skeptic Robert Grumbine asked him to provide an example of a testable hypothesis from astrology that could be used in class. Seers responded with this: “On 10/20/99 from 2 AM to 8 AM EDT, mix a bowl of jello and you will find it won't gel. My basic students have this as a homework assignment to learn of a void-of-course Moon period.” (Note: I have corrected the spelling errors.) Apparently the void-of-course Moon period is a time of bad luck when stuff tends to go wrong; the failure of jello to gel would be an example. Here was Grumbine’s response:
Experimental Results:Read the whole thing, because there’s much scientific mirth to follow – such as Grumbine’s hypotheses about why Seers’s jello failed to gel. But it was Seers’s attempt to squirm out that I found especially amusing: He “disqualified Grumbine's results because he mixed his box of jell-o in two bowls. That was ‘breaking up the substance’.”
10/20/99 at 2:30 AM EDT my wife mixed a batch of consumer-grade jello according to directions. She split the jello to two containers, one about 1.5 cups, and one about 4, and put into the fridge. When I checked at 6:50 AM EDT, both had firmly jelled.
10/21/99 at 3:45 AM EDT my wife again mixed a batch of consumer-grade jello and split in to two containers as before. At 8:00 AM EDT, both had jelled, though the large was somewhat un-firm.
Conclusion:
We followed Mr. Seers procedure both at a time he predicted that the jello would fail to jell, and on a 'control' day. On neither day was there any difficulty apparent in the jelling procedure. His prediction is falsified.
Now that’s funny, because it seems to me Seers had a killer excuse readily available. The void-of-Moon period is supposed to bring about bad luck and stuff going wrong. When you want your jello to gel, it shouldn’t -- but if you’re doing an experiment to show that it won’t gel, it should gel after all! Thus, Seers could claim that Grumbine’s experiment was an example of things going wrong, confirming the astrological hypothesis. This is a problem that could be solved with better institutional design. Two researchers, one astrologer and one skeptic, should run a double-blind experiment, wherein the actual jello makers don’t know what the experiment is supposed to show.
Monday, April 12, 2004
Drug War Follies
Eugene points to a news story about a man who complained to the police about a woman who stole his drugs:
[Police officer Philip] Anelli said the man told him that he and a woman were riding around when he decided to pay for two rocks of crack cocaine. The man planned to smoke one of the rocks and give the other to the woman in exchange for sexual favors. The plan was apparently moving along fine, until the woman smoked both rocks and then ran off without giving up any favors.After being told that he, too, would likely be in legal trouble if his story were confirmed, the man “weighed his options, then told authorities that he felt like he and the woman could work out the problem on their own, without help from police.”
A pretty funny story, but there’s a serious point here. The illegality of drugs and prostitution means the justice system cannot help people enforce their contracts and property rights in those markets. And that’s exactly why black markets are typically characterized by violence. If a drug dealer wants people who transact with him to know he won’t put up with being defrauded, he has to hire thugs to punish those who defraud him. If a prostitute wants to be sure she’ll get paid for her services, she hires a pimp to pressure the recalcitrant johns. People with a comparative advantage in violence naturally get pulled into these professions, with predictably brutal results. In the story above, I have to wonder… what methods might this fellow have had in mind to “work out the problem on their own”?